(LiveHacking.Com) – SSL Pulse, a new project that monitors the quality of SSL sites across the Internet and reports on its findings, has discovered that 90% of all HTTPS websites are insecure. The project has tested the top 200,000 SSL web sites on the Internet and discovered that nearly 180,000 of them are insecure.

The project measures key features about an SSL configuration and ranks the website according to the SSL Server Rating Guide. According to the report 40% of the worlds top SSL sites use 128 bit (or less) ciphers for data transfer and a handful of sites have certificates with keys below 1024 bits.

The biggest weaknesses are insecure renegotiation and susceptibility to a BEAST attack. Over 8,500 sites support insecure renegotiation which since 2009 as been considered insecure. A successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an active man-in-the-middle attacker to inject arbitrary content into an encrypted data stream. The results is that the attacker can impersonate a valid client and steal confidential data.

The SSL Pulse survey reports that 75% of SSL websites are still open to BEAST attacks. A BEAST attack is based on a flaw in the SSL protocol. A successful exploitation of this issue will result in a disclosure of a victim’s session cookies, allowing the attacker to completely hijack the application session. It was resolved in TLS v1.1, but now six years later, most clients and servers do not support newer protocol versions. To protected against a BEAST attack servers need to be configured to use TLS v1.1 or to only use RC4 with TLS v1.0 or SSL v3.0.

“About 50% (99,903 sites) got an A, which is a good result. Unfortunately, many of these A-grade sites (still) support insecure renegotiation (8,522 sites, or 8.5% of the well-configured ones) or are vulnerable to the BEAST attack (72,357 sites, or 72.4% of the well-configured ones). This leaves us with only 19,024 sites (or 9.59% of all sites) that are genuinely secure at this level of analysis,” wrote Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at Qualys and creator of SSL Labs.

The project hopes that these startling numbers will raise awareness of these issues and help web site owners improve their SSL implementations.